“What I’m
trying to get at, is at the heart of this country is some deep racial
animus that animates the very communities we’re trying to lift up,”Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the African American department at Princeton
University told the panel.

There weren’t close to enough of them to flip the outcome in key states....

The Democratic Dependence on White Working-Class Voters

The
larger number of white working-class voters implies that Democrats are
far more dependent on winning white working-class voters,and therefore
more vulnerable to a populist candidate like Mr. Trump.

Over
all,34 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters were white voters without a
college degree, compared with 25 percent in the exit polls, according to
an Upshot statistical model that integrated census data, actual results
and 15,000 interviews from various pre-election surveys. The model
yields a full alternative to the exit polls that assume an older, whiter
electoratelike the one depicted by the census. (For those interested
in the details about our estimates, we’ve written a technical sidebar.)...

Mr.
Obama’s dependence among white voters might seem surprising in light of
the 2012 postelection consensus. But it won’t be surprising if you
think just a little further back — to the pre-election story line. Mr.
Obama’s advantage heading into the election was thought to be a
“Midwestern Firewall” — a big edge in Midwestern battlegrounds where
white working-class voters supported the auto bailout and were skeptical
of Mr. Romney, who was criticized for his time at Bain Capital....

All
of this is good news for a Republican who intends to win with greater
strength among white working-class voters, like Mr. Trump.

There
is a downside for him....Mr. Obama’s strength
among Northern white voters raises doubts about whether the
Republicans, including Mr. Trump, can assume that white working-class
voters are receptive to conservative candidates............

The
best case for Mr. Trump is that white Northerners reluctantly backed
Mr. Obamabecause Mr. Romney was successfully caricatured as a rapacious
plutocrat....

The Missing-White-Voter Theory.There has long been a notion that Mr. Romney was hurt by “missing white
voters,” those who voted in 2008 but skipped the 2012 presidential
election. And the G.O.P.’s hope is that Mr. Trump could benefit with a
surge of those Republican-leaning voters. But that view of 2012 is
largely unsupported by the data.

Is
it possible that some of these Democrats are actually ready to vote for
Mr. Trump? Yes. But it’s a stretch to argue that a huge share of them
would have voted for Mr. Romney or would vote for Mr. Trump, especially
considering how young they are....

Even
if the missing white voters were disproportionately Republican, a
return to previous turnout levels wouldn’t have been anywhere near
enough to get Mr. Romney over the top. There were far fewer missing
white voters in the battleground states than there were nationally.
There weren’t close to enough of them to flip the outcome in key states....

One
of the big questions for Mr. Trump is whether his polling gains among
that group, should they hold, will manifest themselves in battleground
states. Mr. Romney’s national gains over Mr. Bush did him relatively
little good: They were concentrated in the South and Appalachia,where
they had little influence on the Electoral College.For now, it’s an
open question whether Mr. Trump will make outsize gains in important
states like Iowa, Ohio or Wisconsin, where he struggled in the primary
season."...